Sunday, November 28, 2010

Making Online Learning Accessible book

An excellent book for teachers of online classes is

Combs, N. (2010). Making Online Learning Accessible: Inclusive Course Design for Students with Disabilities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470499044.html


It gives practical suggestions for the use of major tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The final chapter addresses the need for Institutional Support.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Papers written by others

In this article The Shadow Scholar the author claims that s/he makes over $60,000 a year writing college papers for others.

Do I believe it? Unfortunately, I do. I have always suspected that college application essays, for example, are written by parents or older siblings, and some have even confessed that they did this. I think the teacher needs to give enough writing assignments to get a feel for what the student can do and then it is easy to spot the fake. However, this means that the institution should not overload the number of students in the teacher's class.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Online education and ADA

As the number of online courses increase, there is growing concern about the use of multimedia and the problems that this may cause for ADA students. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/ada-compliance-a-major-vulnerability-for-online-programs/28136 Often there are not even formal policies. Higher education institutions do not realize that the law does pertain to online courses, but it does. A good introduction to the subject is the book "Making Online Teaching Accessible: Inclusive Course Design for Students with Disabilities" by Norman Coombs, published by Jossey-Bass. http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470499044.html